Page:Cesare Battisti and the Trentino.djvu/29

 For seven long months he remained a private, sharing equally with his companions, the privations and dangers of the war as it is waged in the high mountains—and he no longer possessed the resiliency of youth. Never in those days did he utter a querulous word; he accepted his lot with the humility of an ascetic and the stout heart of a volunteer.

If he expressed the desire of securing a commission as lieutenant, it was for the purpose of extending a little more help to his poor, stranded family; "as for myself," he writes, "I Page twenty-seven